Expreview has published a post about performance improvements of ForceWare 177.79 versus 175.19. From the results, it seems the release 177.79 brings a small 2% of improvement. That’s cool but how the release 177.79 is positionned with another 177.xx, what’s more in OpenGL?

I did the test: ForceWare 177.39 versus ForceWare 177.79 and I benched with oZone3D.Net OpenGL benchmarks. Some of these benchies are rather old (soft shadows and Surface Deformer and we can’t change the benchmark resolution). My rig is: Core 2 Duo 6600 (default clock), 2Gb Corsair DDR2 667 (default clocks) and a GeForce GTX 280 from EVGA (default clocks).

Release 177.39

Release 177.79

FurMark 1920×1200

3172

3173

FurMark 1280×1024

4264

4270

Soft Shadows Branching OFF

6053

5814

Soft Shadows Branching ON

10191

9532

Surface Deformer

7713

7717

TOTAL Sum

31393

30506

From this test, there is no OpenGL performance improvement in this new release compared to the old one. Better we can notice some performance deterioration in the soft shadows benchmark.

As soon as possible, I will update SofShadows and SurfaceDeformer with the same interface than FurMark.